As he sat gnawed by pain, with surgical instruments on his table, and sombre thoughts of suicide in his head, the ray of a little episode of romance shone in incongruously upon the scene. Two ladies in Paris, absorbed in the New Heloïsa, like all the women of the time, identified themselves with the Julie and the Claire of the novel that none could resist. They wrote anonymously to the author, claiming their identification with characters fondly supposed to be immortal. "You will know that Julie is not dead, and that she lives to love you; I am not this Julie, you perceive it by my style; I am only her cousin, or rather her friend, as Claire was." The unfortunate Saint Preux responded as gallantly as he could be expected to do in the intervals of surgery. "You do not know that the Saint Preux to whom you write is tormented with a cruel and incurable disorder, and that the very letter he writes to you is often interrupted by distractions of a very different kind."[36] He figures rather uncouthly, but the unknown fair were not at first disabused, and one of them never was. Rousseau was deeply suspicious. He feared to be made the victim of a masculine pleasantry. From women he never feared anything. His letters were found too short, too cold. He replied to the remonstrance by a reference of extreme coarseness. His correspondents wrote from the neighbourhood of the Palais Royal, then and for long after the haunt of mercenary women. "You belong to your quarter more than I thought," he said brutally.[37] The vulgarity of the lackey was never quite obliterated in him, even when the lackey had written Emilius. This was too much for the imaginary Claire. "I have given myself three good blows on my breast for the correspondence that I was silly enough to open between you," she wrote to Julie, and she remained implacable. The Julie, on the contrary, was faithful to the end of Rousseau's life. She took his part vehemently in the quarrel with Hume, and wrote in defence of his memory after he was dead. She is the most remarkable of all the instances of that unreasoning passion which the New Heloïsa inflamed in the breasts of the women of that age. Madame Latour pursued Jean Jacques with a devotion that no coldness could repulse. She only saw him three times in all, the first time not until 1766, when he was on his way through Paris to England. The second time, in 1772, she visited him without mentioning her name, and he did not recognise her; she brought him some music to copy, and went away unknown. She made another attempt, announcing herself: he gave her a frosty welcome, and then wrote to her that she was to come no more. With a strange fidelity she bore him no grudge, but cherished his memory and sorrowed over his misfortunes to the day of her death. He was not an idol of very sublime quality, but we may think kindly of the idolatress.[38] Worshippers are ever dearer to us than their graven images. Let us turn to the romance which touched women in this